Since the 1988 publication of her first novel, Mary McGarry Morris has earned critical praise for the quality of her writing, along with mixed criticism of its content. Her novels have gained increasing popular attention, with respectable sales for each hardcover edition and subsequent paperback. When Oprah Winfrey selected Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) for her book club, the resulting paperback sales exceeded one million copies. A former caseworker, Morris writes fiction notable for its examination of the essences of human behavior, the needs and desires that motivate men and women, and the ways in which people respond to their circumstances and to the consequences of their own actions. Her prose is remarkable for the subtlety with which she draws her characters. Even as critics note her lapses into melodrama and contrivance, they appreciate the ways in which her sometimes extraordinary plots startle the reader into awareness of the characters'...